LITTLE ROCK — We find it’s often the little things that are the most interesting. There’s no need and little point in writing 2,000-word thumb-suckers on the latest camera or cell phone. Forthwith, here are some notes about little things:
Vpike.com lets you plot a route on a Google map and see it as a series of street views when you click “route” and “drive.” This might be a good way to pick up some landmark views to guide you on your way. It’s interesting but very slow. You could almost walk the trip at the same speed. Worth seeing once.
Spoonflower.com lets you upload your own images and have them printed on fabric. Or, you can select some beautiful fabric that others have designed. We’re going to upload some pictures of crystal formation seen through a microscope.
Humyo.com provides 10 gigabytes of free online storage. That’s a lot. It’s easily enough to hold the entire Encyclopedia Britannica.
LOST IN A QUANDARY?
The first GPS unit that lets you send text messages is supposed to be coming out July 31. It’s the Earthmate PN-60w from Delorme.
Messages are conveyed via satellite and are not dependent on cell-phone coverage, so you can send them even in the deepest darkest jungle. The PN-60w is rugged and water-resistant, just in case you fall into the river and are swept downstream over the rapids.
Users can send messages to e-mail addresses, cell phones, buddy lists, and social-networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Fire Eagle, SpotAdventures.com, or Geocaching.com, complete with GPS coordinates. (Help! I’m floating downstream on the Amazon.) The map coordinates will help, even if they change as you move along.
The device comes with North America GPS, topographic maps and street coverage for the United States and Canada. Nautical charts, aerial images, natural-resource maps, and other locations are available by subscription. This “save me,” or “I am here” device does not come cheap: you can pre-order it for $550 at Amazon.com.
FREE STICKY NOTES
No matter how far we’ve come in this digital age, we still stick notes on our computer. Unfortunately, they sometimes get unstuck and drift away. Virtual sticky notes never drift away, if you get our drift.
Windows 7 users can click the “start” button and type “sticky notes” into the search bar to have their virtual sticky notes ready to use. Right-click a note to change the color from basic yellow. Windows XP users can download a free version from ZDnet.com. To find it, search on “sticky notes portable” or go directly to bit.ly/2sticky.
FREE CONFERENCE CALLS
StreetSmartMeeting.com is a free conference-call service with some extras. It includes a calendar tool that generates invitations to your meeting and provides reminders for group calls. In the past, we’ve missed a lot of conference calls.
Calls are secure and may be recorded and stored for playback for up to 90 days. The service also gives you a free permanent meeting call number, so you can have impromptu calls with colleagues and friends without the hassle of setting up a group call. For a fee, you can also store files that can be shared with your meeting participants, as long as they have an Internet connection. You can allow them to just view the files or edit them.
FEELING THE PULSE
Not to be outdone by the radical makeover of Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo got a face-lift and added new features.
You don’t have to start in a Yahoo e-mail account to see what’s new. Their new site, Pulse.Yahoo.com, aims to be your starting place for everything you do on the Web. The home page looks something like Twitter, with short comments from your Yahoo contacts in 255 characters or less. But unlike Twitter, it has links to just about everything, including e-mail and news.
If you give the site permission, you can view your Facebook friends there. Click “apps” and watch the video of the day, play poker, find gas prices in your area, etc. Click on “blog” to start a blog, or “photos” to share photos. “Trending topics” at the top of the page tell you what’s hot right now. There are also links to e-mail, news and sports. Search “apps” to add other games and news sites to your page.
We were surprised to see a long list of comments from friends who use Yahoo mail. These are people we normally don’t hear from. We learned that an acquaintance named Ellie was playing bridge in the online “Intermediate Lounge” and we clicked to join her there.
The site is getting kudos because you can set privacy settings to be sure you don’t share more than you wanted. (Go to pulse.yahoo.com/ privacy.)
PRIVATE BROWSING
There are lots of ways to browse the Web anonymously. Internet Explorer 8 lets you do this for free. Click “safety” in the upper right of the Explorer 8 screen and you will see the “InPrivate” label. This means your own computer won’t record sites you visit or what you do there. If you choose “InPrivate Filter” from the drop-down menu, websites won’t save records of your visits on their servers. You can do the same thing in Firefox with any of several free add-ons you can find at addons.mozilla.org. “Better Privacy” has nearly 3 million downloads.
If you need more, there’s Anti Tracks, a $35 program from giantmatrix.com. It gives you tools to shred specific files, eliminate duplicates, lock certain folders, wipe a hard disk clean, hide files in pictures or audio files, etc.
NOTE: Readers can search several years’ worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
Business, Pages 20 on 06/21/2010